This e-Research adaptive user interface (eRaUI) project is aiming at developing a personalized user interfaces for a text mining e-Research tool called NaCTeM. eRaUI will be adaptable to different usages and different level of researchers’ knowledge and preferences increasing the use of NaCTeM e-research tools by making it easier to learn and adaptable to the requirements of different user groups.
Project Team: Prof. Farhi Marir, Dr. Sahithi Siva and Dr. Yanguo Jing

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

Weekly Technical Meeting - WP3 - 19th October 2011

Today Sahithi and Eamonn met for one hour to discuss the progress of Work Package three of eRaUI. We discussed a number of areas related to the interface of the widget and related functionality. Firstly, we agreed that the scenario screens which are to be developed, giving details of use cases of eRaUI and associated screenshots, is to be postponed until some further development work is completed. We also agreed that in relation to testing and evaluating eRaUI, it would require at least another two to four weeks of development before we are at a stage to effectively do this.

We looked at the use of live-stream user activity monitoring which has been implemented on the eRaUI admin user interface. We discusse the possibility of displaying miniaturised user sessions within iFrames, which would be an exciting and novel way to present user activity. However we agreed that there are a number of technical limitations which would make it difficult to achieve, viz. the lack of an effective cross-browser technique to miniaturise a webpage within an iFrame (currently only IE supports this to any extent) and also the performance issues which would entail from displaying so many user sessions simultaneously.

We discussed the current weighting system used to delineate terms into categories (i.e. Novice, Student, Expert) and agreed that it is better to make this an automatically generated system - using machine-learning algorithms to automatically assign weightings to each category. We will of course have a means of manually overriding these settings - and this has been built in to the current admin interface of eRaUI.

We discussed the admin-user live communication facility and decided it would be excellent to have peer-peer chat ability enabled also. We discussed some novel ways of presenting user activity to the user. This would create the impression of a virtual community on the site.